Solution-Processed Oxide Complementary Inverter via Laser Annealing and Inkjet Printing

Metal-oxide-semiconductors (MOS) have become an ideal candidate for the next-generation optoelectronic device applications. However, high processing temperature and complicate processes are still tremendous challenge in developing solution-based complementary MOS (CMOS) inverter. In this article, for the first time, femtosecond (fs) laser was used to realize controllable annealing for solution-based CMOS inverter. The achievement of nonstoichiometric p-type oxide thin films was ascribed to the photo-assisted conversion of precursor to metal-oxide (M-O) lattices along with the formation of atom vacancies in oxide lattice due to carrier excitation and relaxation using laser annealing (LA). The field effect mobility of the p-and n-type M-O thin-film transistors (TFTs) with inkjet printing (IJP) and LA was 0.91 and 7.07 cm2/V·s, respectively. Moreover, location control capacity was exploited to separately anneal the p-and n-type oxide deposited with IJP for the fabrication of TFTs, which significantly simplified the fabrication process of the inverter. CMOS inverter with high noise margin and moderate voltage gain above 10 was also obtained. Our work significantly improved the ability to selectively manipulate the functionality and properties of the irradiated materials. The results demonstrated that logic gates based on all-oxide can be large area integrated using our strategy, exhibiting attractive properties and applications of the CMOS integrated circuits in oxide electronics.